Links for 18-Jul

Silverlight development round-up

Never use a warning when you mean Undo

Code critique as an interview tool

The EventHandler<T> delegate 

Links for 30-May

Icebreakers -- interview questions designed to put you both at ease and break out of the scripted, stilted talk that results in bad hires and missing good hires (from the same source as the "Design a Monopoly Server" question)

Hygienic Macros -- practice safe meta-programming

Top 300 XSS sites -- Hall of Shame

Accessible expanding and collapsing menu&

Interviewing

Now I've just finished a round of interviewing, time to let out some of the secrets. It's really about whether the candidate can think on their feet (and can work elegantly around places where they aren't familiar with detail) and knows general software engineering techniques in some depth (according to their length of experience).

Five essential phone-screen questions -- not bad at all

Job Interview 2.0, now with extra riddles -- Is moving Mt Fuji really the way you want to go?  Or does it just select for those with an eye to making the solutions more complicated? Me? I'd not work for a company that uses this interview style. The 10/5/2/1 minute problem I know the answer is 1 minute faster than the obvious one using the 1-minute runner, and if I wanted to do it again, I'd write a program to solve it.

"My favorite interview question" -- it's "How might you design a program that lets people play Monopoly with each other over the internet?"  Not a question that I personally have tried, but the post analyses what makes this question a good one.
 

Miscellanea

How times change - I had to explain yesterday to a 7-year-old boy what smoke signals were.

During the last month, I've been doing some recruiting - and it's terrifying how many people out there are trying to earn a living in software engineering without any idea of what polymorphism is about, or the notion of time-complexity of algorithms, let alone design skills that have any nod towards the notion that software objects should have well defined interfaces and responsibilities. And this is not an age related thing, either. Though eventually we did find a couple of suitably qualified candidates, one mid 20s, one early 40s, who are now with us.